Some of the nation’s worst traffic bottlenecks could affect Delaware drivers over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.
Philadelphia, Washington D.C. and New York City are among the top gridlock trouble spots, according to a new report issued by the American Highway Users Alliance. Data for the study was fed by real-time GPS information.
Traffic jams were ranked based on backups in both directions over the entire day, not just during rush hours.
AAA-Mid-Atlantic spokesman Jim Lardear says addressing the nation's worst 30 bottlenecks would solve a number of transportation issues.
“We could see savings of about 39 billion dollars in lost time,” he says. “We could save 830 million gallons of fuel, prevent over 200,000 vehicle crashes and most importantly I think, we could reduce over 17 billion pounds of greenhouse gas emissions.”
The American Highway Users Alliance is calling on Congress to pass a multi-year funding bill to keep the highway trust fund afloat.
Lardear says the report highlights the importance of addressing the nation’s critical transportation issues.
“That’s why we got involved with this study,” he says. “It gets to one of the points that we’ve been trying to make nationally. We need to properly fund the infrastructure that we have here in the United States and you’ve seen some concern over how the federal government is funding it, or lack thereof.”
Lawmakers are working on a multiyear highway bill that would authorize six years of federal transportation funding.
Delaware’s senior senator Tom Carper was among 26 senators that issued a letter to members of the highway bill conference committee urging them to consider an increase in infrastructure investment around the country.
